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[Attention conservation notice: probably not of interest to lawyers; this is about my previous life in software development.] Someone recently mentioned JWZ’s old post on the CADT (Cascade of Attention Deficit Teecnagers) development model, and that finally has pushed me to say: I am the CADT. I did the bug closure that triggered Jamie’s rant,…

James Grimmelman is a better writer than I am. I already knew this, but in this commentary on Biella Coleman’s (excellent) Coding Freedom, he captures something I have struggled to express for years in two crisp, clean sentences: Hacker legal education, with its roots in programming, is strong on formal precision and textual exegesis. But…

The past two days were my fourth OSI face-to-face board meeting, this time about a block from my office in San Francisco. Some brief thoughts: I’m excited about the hire of our new General Manager (and first paid employee), Patrick Masson. One of the hardest things for an all-volunteer organization is execution: finishing the…

strike {color:red;} u {color:blue;} Synopsis for lawyers You should really buy the Manual of Style for Contract Drafting – it’ll make you a better drafter and editor. This post applies the book’s rules and guidelines to a publicly-available legal agreement (Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement) to explain what the book is and why it is valuable.…

I was lucky enough to attend the Creative Commons Global Summit in Buenos Aires last week, including the pre-conference session on copyright reform. Like Wikimania, there is simply too much here to summarize in coherent chunks, so here are my motes and thoughts during my return flight: Maira Sutton of EFF summed up my strongest…

I was going to write a long, involved post about why I donated again to the Ada Initiative, and why you should too, especially in the concluding days of this year’s fundraising drive (which ends Friday). But instead Jacob Kaplan-Moss said it better than I can. Some key bits: I’m been working with (and on)…

More random, more-or-less stream-of-(un)consciousness notes on the last few days of Wikimania: The cab driver who got me to the airport had (at least) five cellphones. Two were mounted on each side of the steering wheel, and then a fifth appeared from somewhere else half-way through our drive to the airport. Two were Android(-ish?) smartphones,…

Soooo much. As with the first two days, these are fragmentary notes as much for my benefit as for anyone else’s, so take with bullet points of salt: The lion dance in the opening ceremony was exactly as advertised – a good way to wake up. It was nice to hear the French issue called…

I’m pretty sure this is a cold, not jet lag. Not sure which would be better/worse browse this site. More notes: Continue to hear Wikidata licensing concerns; need to work on communicating about that. Multimedia round-table is well-attended (to the point of people sitting on the floor), even as someone points out that the day…

Collected bullet points from day 1 of my first Wikimania: Hong Kong is intense. I am used to, and like, big cities, but HK feels like a scale different even from, say, Cairo, New York, Delhi, or Bangalore. Had great fun last night walking around with a few friends, ended up at Temple Spice Crab…